Is five-nine (99.999%) reliability a reality in today’s Telecom?

I have spent many years working directly within many of the big name Telecommunications Providers and I think there are many factors that contribute to a service declining trend.

First I think that 99.999% is hard to do even in traditional TDM deployments. It requires a lot of discipline and planning in operations to do this, and let’s face it many cLEC’s don’t have it.

Many providers are deploying VOIP services over old IP networks that were not designed to give 99.999% availability. IP was always a secondary non-critical service by many consumers and was not considered a critical service by Telephone companies. The IP networks need to be able to provide 99.999% availability before any service riding on it will be able to.

Consumers should also know that VOIP does not bring about lower prices. It facilitates some additional features, functionality and design benefits. You get more but you don’t necessarily pay less. In some instances it does save money. But I have seen many in which it costs more.

Many large VOIP providers are providing VOIP services over the public Internet. This just doesn’t work for large deployments. Many of their customers are deploying low budget communications systems for their business. On top of the fact that the traffic transverses the Internet they are usually running this over a DSL circuit which cannot provide consistent IP quality to the Internet. So a low budget deployment such as this is where you get the horror stories. These are really horror customers. The best deployment here is a couple of LAN lines and their DSL.

If you want to benefit from VOIP and experience high availability you need to step up to a TDM link to the same provider who is also hosting your VOIP service. Yes this costs a little more but that is why it works. You may also be surprised to see that this costs less than your DSL and traditional analog lines that you currently have.